CSE Prof. YY Zhou's current startup Whova is on a roll, along with the company's software engineering development team, The Whova app was selected as the Event Tech of the Week by the blog TechsyTalk, which keeps event organizers up-to-date on new technologies to enhance the event experience for both organizers and attendees. Zhou and co-founder Weiwei Xiong responded to questions from blogger Liz King. "An important factor for successful events is how well your attendees engage and connect with you, with the speakers and each other," said Zhou (pictured below). "A great attendee experience can improve retention, foster relationships and build community."
The Whova development team includes three alumni of CSE's doctoral program: Jiaqi Zhang (Ph.D. '14), Zhuoer (Joel) Wang and Rishan Chen. Two other Whova developers also did research in CSE: Soyeon Park was a postdoc and project scientist from 2009 to 2013, and Tianwei (Tim) Sheng was a CSE postdoc from 2011 to 2013.
"The Whova app makes attendees an active part of the event and extends the engagement beyond the event's location and time limit," added Whova's Weiwei Xiong. "Research has shown that active participation provides a significantly better experience than passive attendance, and in comparison with other apps, Whova has the highest download ratio, typically around 60-90%. That's why we have a very high customer retention rate." That ratio is the percentage of total attendees at an event who actually downloaded the app.
Asked about the 'coolest' feature of the app, Whova's co-founders pointed to features including a personalized agenda, attendee networking, photo sharing, Twitter integration. real-time announcements, and the integration of the app with various registration systems. "We have also used machine intelligence to automatically recognize event organizers' data formats to minimize the amount of manual data entry by organizers," noted Zhou, who holds the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing. "From the app side, another very unique feature is business-card scanning and digitization, as well as attendee networking (one-to-one chats and group chats)."